Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Paul Ryan Can’t Lose

Paul Ryan at a rally in Fishersville, Va.Credit
Josh Haner/The New York Times

On a Monday night in late September, Paul Ryan sat on the edge of a couch in his suite at the Cincinnatian Hotel, his left fist clenched so tightly around the neck of his bottle of Miller Lite that I could see the veins bulging in his hands. It was the end of a long day that began at Ryan’s home in Janesville, Wis., where he’d spent the weekend preparing for the vice-presidential debate. Early Monday morning, he flew to the first of two fund-raisers, on top of which he did three local TV interviews and a brief chat on Fox Business Network and also a town-hall meeting, plus a half-hour phone call with Mitt Romney, after which he finally settled in on the couch to watch his Green Bay Packers play the Seattle Seahawks on “Monday Night Football.” A few minutes after kickoff, Ryan’s traveling press secretary, Michael Steel, led me into the suite where Ryan was watching the game with his older brother Tobin, his campaign adviser Dan Senor, the Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and Senator Rob Portman of Ohio.

“Is this the guy who’s writing that hit piece on me?” Ryan said, rising to shake my hand. He’s adept at wielding sarcasm in a way that can both disarm and manipulate — signaling a likable, faux-fatalistic awareness of How the Game Is Played. At 42, Ryan looks even younger and more angular in person than he does on television. He says he was teased as a child for looking like Eddie Munster, because of his black widow’s peak, and in the course of reporting this article, I also heard people liken him to Greg Brady; Will Schuester, the music-club director in “Glee”; Kyle MacLachlan, who played Special Agent Dale Cooper on “Twin Peaks”; a bat; an owl; an eagle; and Boner, from “Growing Pains.”

“Get yourself some ribs,” Ryan said after shaking my hand. Everyone had plates balanced on their laps filled with ribs and chicken and coleslaw from a Cincinnati barbecue joint that Ryan frequented in his college days at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The game on TV was the infamous contest — the crime, Ryan called it — that effectively forced a settlement of the referees’ lockout, after Seattle won on a last-second touchdown pass that the replacement officials should have ruled an interception or offensive pass interference. At a rally the next morning, Ryan would parallel the incompetence of the replacement refs to President Obama’s handling of the economy. But the calamity unfolding now involved the Packers offensive line being devoured by the Seattle pass rush, which was on its way to sacking quarterback Aaron Rodgers eight times in the first half. “And we drafted all these linemen too,” Ryan said.

Ryan tries to plan his schedule around Packers games and also owns shares in the team, the only nonprofit, community-held professional sports franchise in the United States. “I am an owner,” he said proudly. When I made a crack about how that would make him another of Mitt Romney’s rich N.F.L.-owner pals — a reference to Romney’s ill-fated attempt in March to score Everyman points by asserting his friendship with a couple of the league’s chieftains — Ryan did not seem to know what I was talking about, or pretended not to.

Across from the couch where Ryan was sitting, Portman kept urging me to “get some sauce” for my ribs, motioning to a glass bowl next to the television. Portman, a former congressman and White House budget director, was a top runner-up to Ryan in the vice-presidential sweepstakes. One mark against the wealthy senator was that he might be perceived as too much of a Grey Poupon Republican in the stiff mold of Romney, an image Ryan helps to counter with his deer-hunting, football-loving, Rage Against the Machine-listening ways. As Seattle’s quarterback unleashed a long pass from midfield — and as Portman looked up suggestively at me and said, again, “It’s all about the sauce” — the Ryan brothers let out a simultaneous moan as the Seahawks went up 7-0. Ryan swigged from his beer and sniffled and made the first of several mentions of the bad head cold he was fighting. “I should not be drinking,” he said. “But, c’mon, it’s ribs, it’s football, so I gotta have a beer.” He then coughed a couple of times and announced that he would be watching the second half in bed.

Earlier this month, I traveled to Danville, Ky., for the debate in which Ryan would turn in a competent if somewhat innocuous performance that was largely overshadowed by Joe Biden’s amped-up mannerisms. In the arc of the campaign, the evening would probably be recalled as a spirited and entertaining spectacle with minimal impact on the ultimate result. What was striking to me was the almost giddy mood that suddenly came over the Romney camp and Republicans in general — high-fives for Sean Hannity in the spin room, surrogates hailing the efforts of “the next vice president.” It was as if they were just now getting their heads around the idea that they might actually win this thing, after a period in which they seemed so resigned to defeat that all that was left to do was engage in a kind of pre-emptive soul-searching over what — and who — came next.

When I first started trailing Ryan in late September, things were not looking good for Mitt Romney, and some of this soul-searching was focused on Ryan. Specifically on the question of why he was he not playing a bigger and more visible role in the campaign. The leading actor, Romney, did not seem to be cutting it, after all, and many conservatives were preparing to write him off as another object lesson in Why We Must Stop Nominating Moderates and move on. The campaign endured a snake-bitten stretch that ran from Romney’s European tour in July to his bounce-free convention in August and on through a blunder-filled September, ending finally with Romney’s strong performance (or Obama’s horrific performance, depending on your perspective) in the first presidential debate on Oct. 3. For Ryan, the trick during that bedeviled stretch was to do no harm — to the campaign, yes, but also to himself. “There is absolutely no downside to being a good soldier in a presidential race, and Ryan is smart enough to realize this,” Craig Robinson, the former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, told me on his way to a Ryan rally in Dubuque two days before the vice-presidential debate. “If Romney loses, I have no doubt the G.O.P. would move on quickly,” Robinson added. “And Ryan would, too.”

He was speaking to something that various Republicans were beginning to consider and express — that if Obama was re-elected, it would be bad, but there could also be an ushering in of the new face of the party. After the drubbing of four years ago and the freak-show primary season and the ill-fated summer, it was time to contemplate a younger, more dynamic and more purely conservative future. To many, Paul Ryan was a key figure — if not the key figure — in that future. In fact, his selection as running mate instantly mollified two basic insecurities that had been nagging at the conservative establishment for some time: one was that their standard-bearer, Romney, was a closet moderate who could not win over the hard-core “movement conservatives”; the other was that the fervor that animated the Tea Party movement had acquired a dangerously anti-intellectual strain, embodied by the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. When I asked Ryan if today’s Republican Party was more “idea based” than it was two years ago, he squinted his intense eyes, nodded hard and said yes. I then asked his opinion of the more, let’s say, knowledge-averse bent of some conservative populism, mentioning Palin and Bachmann while understanding that he obviously couldn’t outwardly offend them or their supporters. “I have my poker face on,” Ryan said before letting slip with a tight grin.

In the midst of Romney’s deliberations, Ryan was the clear running mate of choice among the right-wing commentariat. (“The Republican Party’s intellectual leader,” wrote The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes and William Kristol, who is partly credited with “discovering” Palin during a cruise to Alaska hosted by the magazine in 2007.) Ryan was considered a long shot among several contenders — he was too young, too conservative and too potentially offensive to older voters because of his plan to overhaul Medicare. Another knock was that he was too cerebral, or “wonkish,” to win broad appeal in a general election. This is one of those backhanded criticisms that in fact flatter. He was “too smart,” “too substantive,” in other words, for the sound-bite shorthand of the campaign trail.

Ryan had worn the mantle of the “serious man” for some time in Washington. It was a reputation burnished by both sides (In 2010, President Obama called his budget plan “a serious proposal”), and when Ryan was selected, it led many D.C. Thought Leaders to praise Romney for his bold and substantive stroke. In the time I spent with him, everyone around Ryan was very invested in conveying that he is indeed a detail-obsessed man of great substance. Satisfied that I fully appreciated the barbecue sauce, Rob Portman asked me as he was leaving Ryan’s suite if I attended the town-hall event that day in Lima. Yes, I had.

“Tell me how many politicians can do that?” Portman asked.

“Do what?”

“Go out in front of a crowd, with that level of detail and intellectual honesty. I’m impressed!”

“And with a bad head cold!” Ryan chimed in.

Ryan is gifted at shrouding a cutthroat ambition in sheepish nonchalance. It is a key political skill — trying constantly to impress without looking as if you’re trying — and one that has eluded many politicians past and present. He is also deft at conveying precision and specificity without being the least bit precise or specific. He has honed his image carefully and promotes it relentlessly on the stump. In late September, Ryan introduced a slide-show demonstration to his appearances. “I’m sort of a PowerPoint guy, so bear with me,” he said the first time he did this, in Orlando, Fla., by way of apologizing for his apparent inability to communicate without his security blanket. Though his PowerPoint presentation is an extremely basic four-slide tutorial that shows how much the national debt has risen since World War II — something that many fifth graders could grasp — his home crowds invariably nod and praise him for his faith in their ability to grasp hard truths. The PowerPoint shtick, combined with the headbanger energy of AC/DC (“It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’ roll” blares when Ryan arrives onstage), conveys a not-so-subtle message that Ryan is a distinctly un-Romney-like next-generation hybrid and that he’s just ready to get out there and do some truth-telling.

But as with any national campaign, there have been strains: to his health (the head cold has lasted weeks), to his patience (a testy end to a local-news interview in Michigan in early October) and most important to his reputation as a purveyor of the power of reality-based conservatism (his convention speech was like Christmas morning for fact-checkers). Ryan was embarrassed in August after telling the radio host Hugh Hewitt that he once ran a marathon in “under three, high twos” (after a writer for Runner’s World dug into the records for the Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minn., Ryan acknowledged that his actual time was 4:01.25). And more substantive, in an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” he was asked repeatedly how he would offset the 20 percent rate cuts that the Romney tax plan called for — a move that the Obama campaign, citing independent groups, said would cost the government $5 trillion over 10 years. Ryan disputed that figure, but Wallace did not relent, asking how they would pay for the tax cuts, however much they amounted to. “It’s revenue neutral,” Ryan kept saying. They would eliminate some loopholes and deductions to make up for the rate cut. Which ones? He would not say, and when Wallace pressed, Ryan filibustered with talk about why it was best to give money to individuals rather than to governments. He recited his credentials (“I’ve been on the Ways and Means Committee for 12 years”), complained about the meaningless subjectivity of statistics and offered his standard “we can do this” reassurance. Finally, after Wallace asked Ryan yet again how the numbers would work, Ryan maintained, “It would take me too long to go through all of the math.”

Photo

A day after the first presidential debate, spirits soared in Fishersville, Va.Credit
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The Wallace interview fed a problematic narrative for the Romney campaign: that its numbers did not add up. It also slightly tipped the halo of the wonk for Ryan; or at the very least provided an object lesson in the limitations that a supposed seller of “bold ideas” and “hard truths” confronts when straitjacketed by the on-message demands of a presidential campaign.

Ryan figured on a friendlier audience two days later at a town-hall meeting in Clinton, Iowa. “I gotta call on her,” Ryan said, pointing to a woman in a Packers jacket who was raising her hand. The woman, Linda Morrison, asked: “Where are the answers? I mean, why aren’t you more specific? I heard you, was it Sunday, when you were on Fox, and you didn’t answer his question about how we’re going to — you know, what are your plans?”

Nodding slowly, Ryan then recited again their list of five priorities — energy, trade, deficit reduction, etc. — even though Wallace’s question was about his tax plan, which he mentioned last. He noted closing loopholes, ending deductions, again not indicating which ones. He assured Morrison that he did have specifics on how the plan would add up, but it’s complicated. “The problem is it just took me about five minutes to go into all of this with you,” Ryan said. “When you are on a 30-second TV show,” he added, “you can’t do as much.”

After the rally, I asked Ryan if he had any regrets about the Wallace interview. “I’m not the kind of guy who has a lot of regrets,” he said, and again he explained his unwillingness to be specific with Wallace as a product of the medium — television — rather than any obfuscation on his part. If anything, Ryan said, his challenge is that he becomes too steeped in details, not that he is unwilling to reveal them. “I get too deep in the weeds too fast, and I start losing people,” he told me. “I had about seven statistics running through my mind when Chris asked me that. And I’m like, If I go through a recitation of all this, it’s going to burn three minutes, and they’re going to change the channel.” Ryan concluded his answer with his standard, “Trust me.” He reassured me: “We can do what we say we’re going to do, we’re very clear about that. I’ve been running numbers on tax-reform proposals for years.”

Skeptics say Ryan owes his superwonk standing as much to comparisons with his colleagues than to any great knowledge or depth. In a recent profile of Ryan by Alec MacGillis in The New Republic, Barney Frank dismissed his colleague’s brainy reputation as being relative to that of other House Republicans, some of whom had just been implicated in a late-night escapade during a Congressional trip to Israel last summer. “He is being graded on a curve,” Frank said of Ryan, “with a bunch of guys who jump into the Sea of Galilee because they want to be closer to God.”

Jared Bernstein, who read Ryan’s fiscal proposals when he worked as chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Biden, was more pointed regarding Ryan’s credibility. “He definitely talks the talk,” Bernstein told me. “He has a great facility with a particular set of words, like ‘baseline,’ ‘nondefense discretionary’ and things like that.” Bernstein said he eventually came to the view that while Ryan might understand basic concepts, “he does not actually understand what it takes to craft a budget.” This became clear when Ryan was chairman of the House Budget Committee after 2010. “I would say at this point that his budgetary knowledge is a stalking horse for his ideology,” Bernstein told me, meaning that what was important wasn’t the actual balancing of the budget but the slashing of government spending and programs like Medicare and Social Security and the revenue-generating taxes that pay for them. By picking Ryan, Romney signaled that he too was all-in on Big Idea conservatism. And here was the guy, popular with the base and well liked in Congress, who was going to help him sell it to America.

While the notion that Washington operates like a high school has become a cliché, it is an apt one: “No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent,” Joan Didion wrote of the former president in “Political Fictions.” In a Rolling Stone profile of John McCain during the 2000 presidential campaign, David Foster Wallace described the then-maverick Republican as a “varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates.” When Ryan actually was in high school — Joseph A. Craig High School, in Janesville — he was the kind who joined a million clubs, befriended teachers and was recognized in his yearbook as his class’s Biggest Brown-Noser. People in both parties described him to me as pleasant and thoughtful and one of the easier members of Congress to get along with. Others have found him arrogant, self-righteous and emblematic of the earnest striver types who populate so many Congressional and White House staffs (and think tanks, policy institutes and lobbying shops), no matter what party is in charge.

Like more or less every politician seeking to stay in the capital, Ryan is quick to express his anti-Washington sentiments. “Not a D.C. guy,” is how he described himself to me in Cincinnati after a soliloquy on Hu-Dey, a Bengals-inspired beer he consumed back in his college days. He sleeps on a cot in his office (its own clichéd symbol of proof of a congressman’s unrootedness), the better to work late, save rent and then return home on weekends to see his family in Janesville.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In fact, Ryan has spent half his life in Washington, arriving right out of college to work in a series of staff jobs before being elected to Congress in 1998, at 28. He met his wife, Janna — who is the first cousin of Representative Dan Boren, a moderate Democrat from Oklahoma — at a party near Washington, in the late ’90s, when she was working as a lawyer and a lobbyist at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He worked closely with Rob Portman in Congress and again years later when Portman served as budget director in the George W. Bush administration; he met Dan Senor in the mid-’90s, when the two were Congressional staff members. A brief foray into the “do you know” game with Ryan quickly yields endless Capitol Hill associations. When the name of my New York Times colleague Carl Hulse, who was a longtime Congressional correspondent, came up, Ryan mentioned that he and Carl get their hair cut by the same stylist (Hanna) at a Capitol Hill salon called Bubbles.

Talking to Ryan, I was struck by the number of mentors he has collected at every rung of his career (and several more have taken to describing themselves as such). He attributes this tendency to having lost his father, a prominent lawyer, when he was 16. Ryan came to Washington at 21 and affixed himself to a procession of conservative luminaries, many of them his bosses. He worked for the Reagan-era education secretary William Bennett, with whom he has since taken several mountain-climbing trips to Colorado over the years, as well as the former congressman and supply-sider sage Jack Kemp, who died in 2009 and has been described as a father figure to Ryan. “He instinctively knew how to get you into the action,” says Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas and former member of Congress for whom Ryan worked as legislative director in the mid-’90s. By that, Brownback said, he meant that Ryan combined policy acumen with political instincts that allowed him to see which issues would become hot and which bills had a chance of passing.

One of Ryan’s most formative influences has been Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma with whom he overlapped for one term in the House in the late 1990s. Coburn was a viscerally anti-Washington conservative long before that sentiment coalesced into the Tea Party. Known as Dr. No, Coburn, a recently retired physician, has built his political career on displeasing the constituencies that politicians spend most of their time trying to please — the activists, the donors, the party leadership and many of his colleagues. His contempt for them is genuine, bipartisan and in many cases mutual. He once prescribed a “spinal transplant” for 70 percent of the Senate and another time said his colleagues had “reproductive organs the size of BBs.”

The central tenet of today’s Congress is “careerism,” Coburn says, mocking the politician’s most basic self-preservation impulse. “Both parties today are ultimately controlled not by ideas but by the desire to be in control, a posture that creates little motivation for bold change,” he wrote in his 2003 book “Breach of Trust.” Ryan told me that he read Coburn’s book closely and more than once. It resonated for him throughout the Bush years — a period in which, despite Republican majorities, he was often profoundly frustrated and unhappy over the continued growth of the government and his own complicity in it.

“I did a lot of defensive voting during that time,” Ryan said, referring specifically to a 2003 bill that overhauled Medicare and gave seniors prescription-drug benefits at a cost first estimated at $400 billion over 10 years. (“Catholic guilt,” Ryan joked, explaining his vote.) Gaining a permanent majority supplanted budget discipline as his party’s governing imperative. “Earmark your way, ribbon-cut your way, and you’ll keep your job,” Ryan said. In 2006, House Democrats reclaimed the majority in the midterm elections, putting what Bush called a “thumpin’ ” on the Republican Party. It was well deserved, Ryan said. He thought seriously about quitting Congress, maybe joining a policy group. He did a lot of bowhunting, spending long contemplative days in his tree stand. He talked a lot to Coburn. “He taught me to do exactly what you believe and let the chips fall where they may,” Ryan told me.

He introduced the first version of his signature budget plan, “Roadmap for America’s Future,” in May 2008. Only eight Republicans in the House signed it, wary of the retribution that might come from voters if they were seen supporting an overhaul of Medicare and Social Security. “People said, ‘This is political suicide,’ ” Ryan told me. “I’m like: I don’t care. First of all, I don’t think that’s right, but we’ll find out.” He considered running for Senate in 2010 but says the best possible outcome held no appeal: “It’s 6 years, then 12 years,” Ryan said. “And then, next thing you know it’s 18 years, and you’ve spent your entire life in Congress.” He says this with a tone of contempt and a full-faced smirk that is a bit striking given that it would describe the life choice of many of his colleagues.

Photo

Ryan with his wife, Janna, and their daughter, Liza, in 2004.Credit
Tom Williams/Roll Call/Newscom

“It set him free,” Coburn told me, speaking of Ryan’s vow to himself after 2006. “If you decide that you’re just going to . . . not play the political game, all of a sudden you can have fun.” I asked Coburn where Ryan fell on the spectrum of Washington careerism. He has been here half his life, after all, and is way too much of a pleaser to ever be a Coburn-style irritant. He would fit many people’s definition of a Washington careerist.

“Paul Ryan is a rare exception in my mind, because he still takes bold positions,” Coburn said. “My criticism of career politicians is that they always do what’s expedient for their career. I don’t think what he recommended on Medicare or Social Security was good for his career.”

Early this month, after visiting the Clinton, Iowa, home where his mother-in-law grew up and posing for photos with the current owners, Ryan headed out on an hourlong drive along the Mississippi River to the town of Muscatine. Michael Steel led me onto the cushy campaign bus, appointed with deep vinyl seats emblazoned with the Romney-Ryan insignia, a wood-paneled kitchen, a living room in back and all manner of laptops, television and other communications gadgets. Sitting across from me, Ryan said he thought his party would continue its rightward bend rather than moving back to the moderate middle. “The Tea Party was a godsend,” he said, because the movement forced new focus on fiscal issues. The election of 2010 brought a fresh wave of resolute conservatives to Congress, “but you need another cycle to finish the job, to bring in more cause-oriented people instead of career-oriented people,” Ryan said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to encourage.”

Ryan’s stump appearances include a standard line in which he says that “both parties got us into this mess.” The line always receives big applause, and it seems designed to lend a veneer of bipartisanship to his deeply partisan policy arguments and a personal record that reflects no participation in major bipartisan legislation over 13 years in Congress. Ryan also says in his speeches that winning this election would endow him and Romney with the “moral authority” and the “mandate” to enact their agenda and move the country, implicitly, to the right. Yet since Romney’s successful performance in his first debate, the campaign’s message has tacked notably to the center, with more emphasis on Romney’s bridge-building efforts with Democrats in Massachusetts (a state the former governor seemed terrified to even utter during the primaries). Romney even struck a softer tone on abortion, at least temporarily, when he told an Iowa newspaper that he saw “no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.” The next day, Romney was compelled to reassert his anti-abortion legitimacy — assuring reporters that he would “remove funding for Planned Parenthood.”

In the vice-presidential debate, Ryan emphasized that he would support the position of the Romney administration on abortion, even though it differed from his own. “I would call him a pragmatic conservative,” Brownback says of Ryan. He recalls Ryan as a true conservative believer when he was on his staff — particularly disdainful of government subsidies for ethanol, which are popular in farm states like Kansas. But later, when Ryan was elected to Congress, Brownback teased him about his own support for dairy subsidies in Wisconsin. “I used to give him raspberries over that,” Brownback says. “I would say, ‘O.K., Mr. Purity, it’s not so easy now, is it?’ ”

Ryan told me that he envisions a vice presidency in which he oversees a vast portfolio on fiscal and economic issues. He agreed fully with the suggestion — first mentioned to me by one of his advisers — that his assignment could be the fiscal version of the role Dick Cheney played on national security after Sept. 11. “It’s a role where you take your expertise and your value-add and you apply it,” Ryan said during a conversation in which he used the phrase “value-add” three times in a 60-second stretch. “My knowledge is how Congress works, how the budget works. Economic policy. That’s my value-add.”

It’s hard not to consider what would happen if Romney continues to campaign as a moderate, wins and then tries to govern as one. In the spin room following the Ryan-Biden debate, I asked Jeb Hensarling, a Republican congressman from Texas and former chairman of the House Conservative Caucus, if he had any concerns about Romney’s recent tack to the center. Hensarling immediately pushed back. “Any question any conservative ever had about Mitt Romney,” he added, “was erased when he asked Paul Ryan to be his vice-presidential candidate.” Hensarling’s enthusiasm for Romney was not surprising here — this was a spin room, after all, not exactly a hothouse for the exchange of private doubts. But I was struck by the degree to which conservatives have taken to using the fact of Ryan’s selection as an all-purpose, get-out-of-jail-free card for Romney, even as his campaign coordinators have begun speaking a somewhat different language.

Late on our drive to Muscatine, Michael Steel, the press secretary, asked me if I was sufficiently assured that Ryan was satisfied with his role on the campaign — that his rapport with Romney was good and he was happy with how he was being used. (I did ask him, and big surprise, the answer was yes.)

“Just noise,” Ryan told me of the second-guessing about his deployment. The critics “don’t see me on Dayton TV, Richmond TV, Dubuque TV,” he said. “It’s literally, if I’m not on Fox News every 36 hours, people think I’m fading into the woodwork.”

As the Ryan bus approached Muscatine, the candidate described for me a personal e-mail that Romney sent him three weeks earlier. “He said, ‘I basically picked you because I thought you could help me govern,’ ” Ryan said. “ ‘I never knew you’d be decent at campaigning, and you turned out to be pretty good at that, too. So, thanks.’ ”

I asked if he considered Romney a mentor, and he paused for a second. “I see him as an older partner,” he said. “You have to understand, I was elected to Congress when I was 28, so I’m used to working with a lot of people who are much older. It’s a relationship I’m very accustomed to.”

Few if any alliances are as fraught as those between presidents and vice presidents — strategically, politically, psychologically. It’s hard not to wonder how this one would evolve in the White House, what would happen if Ryan found himself wedged between the pragmatic governing demands of his “older partner” and the true-belief system of the movement — and the chamber — he came from.

If Romney loses, the recriminations play out in two predictable ways among Republicans. Some will say that the party must attract a broader base of support among independent and moderate and nonwhite voters, which would argue for the less severely conservative tone that Romney adopted right after his first debate. They might even point to the presence of Ryan on the ticket as, ultimately, a negative, that his selection did nothing to move national polls in favor of Romney and possibly even scared off potential voters.

But a far more vocal — and probably bigger — group on the right will maintain that the ticket was not conservative enough. They will insist that Republicans need to stop nominating the next establishment guy in line. They will say Mitt Romney ran a lousy general election campaign, except for his finest act, the elevation of Paul Ryan, who was a very good Boy Scout and who waited his turn.

Correction: November 18, 2012

An article on Oct. 21 about Paul Ryan and his campaign to become America’s next vice president misspelled the surname of the author of a New Republic magazine profile on Ryan. He is Alec MacGillis, not McGillis.